Challenge West Virginia

November 20, 2018

Challenge West Virginia is a statewide organization of parents, educators and other West Virginians committed to maintaining and improving small community schools. Our goal is to reform education in the Mountain State so that citizens have a voice in policy decisions and every child has the opportunity to receive a first-class education and the promise of a bright future.

Charter schools have exploded across the country in the past 20 years and their growth has often been controversial. Here’s a primer on charter schools and why they’ve spurred so much attention in Pennsylvania.

What is a charter school?

In essence, a charter school is a privately run but publicly funded school. The idea was first implemented in Minnesota in 1992 with the intent of testing out new educational approaches. The hope was that those innovations would be fed back into public schools, improving education for all students.

The concept quickly became popular across the country. By 1996, 25 states hosted more than 700 charter schools. Charter schools were first authorized in Pennsylvania in 1997 and four charter schools opened in Philadelphia that fall. In 2002, the first cyber charter schools were introduced in Pennsylvania, allowing students do the bulk of their school on a home computer.

Why are they called “charter schools”?

All charter schools have an agreement, also known as a “charter,” with their local school district that allows their operation.

To set up a brick-and-mortar charter school, individuals or a group request authorization from their local school board. To set up a cyber charter school, an applicant has to apply to the Department of Education.

How many charter schools are there in Pennsylvania?

In addition to Pennsylvania’s 500 public school districts there are 162 brick-and-mortar charter schools and 14 cyber charter schools. More than half of those brick-and-mortar schools are in Philadelphia. Harrisburg has four charter schools.

Altogether, about 120,000 of Pennsylvania’s 1.7 million students, from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade, are enrolled in charter schools – about 7 percent of all students.

How are they different from regular schools?

Charter schools are exempt from many state regulations that apply to traditional public schools. For instance, only 75 percent of full-time teachers at a charter school need to be licensed.

The freedom given to charter schools has produced some interesting experiments in education. The Charter High School for Architecture and Design in Philadelphia has a curriculum that focuses on design and liberal arts.

Why are charter schools controversial?

While charter schools began as a way to generate educational innovations, and innovative schools do exist, critics say that for a number of reasons they now significantly hurt public education.

One of the biggest criticisms leveled by opponents is that charter schools in Pennsylvania and across the nation have largely turned into money-making opportunities for entrepreneurs and large corporations that have little interest in educational innovation.

In Pennsylvania, a charter school has to be set up as a non-profit. However, charter-school companies get around that by setting up a foundation to file the application and then contracting with those companies to run the school. Charter-school management organizations sometimes run dozens of schools. Charter Schools USA, based in Florida, manages 70 schools in seven different states and makes nearly $300 million in revenue. Mastery Charter Schools runs 15 schools in Pennsylvania.

Critics say these companies skimp on education costs, such as hiring experienced teachers, so they can turn a profit. And rather than focusing on innovation and quality of education, critics say, they tend to focus narrowly on standardized testing.

Who supports charter schools?

Despite the criticisms leveled against them, charter schools have found staunch supporters in Pennsylvania and other states.

Many of the biggest advocates of charter school are right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Foundation. In recent years, many politicians have championed charter schools and privatization of K-12 education as a way to reform and improve failing schools. Republicans, such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, have been particularly vocal supporters, but some Democrats, such as President Barack Obama, also have vouched support for them.

To supporters, particularly on the right, the appeal of charter schools lies largely in a belief that education ultimately will be improved by giving parents more choice about where they can educate their children. The theory is that if schools have to compete against each other to attract students – just as restaurants compete for customers – good schools will thrive and bad schools will close, thereby improving overall education quality. They consider the status quo a government-run monopoly.

Critics believe that the nature of education means it doesn’t fit a market-place model and monetizing children creates perverse incentives. They point to other countries, where students significantly outscore American students on international tests, as providing a better model for improving education. In Finland, ranked among OECD countries as one of the world’s best performing in education, the government has focused on improving equity between school districts, there are few standardized tests, teachers tend to have master’s degrees, and child poverty is significantly less than in America.

How much profit do for-profit charter schools make?

Determining the profit margin of charter school operators in Pennsylvania can be tricky because many argue they are not subject to the state’s financial transparency laws like traditional public schools.

A report by the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, which hosts one of the nation’s largest number of for-profit charter schools, found that companies took at least a twelve percent cut of a school’s budget. The report also found that schools spent about $2000 less per student than traditional public schools. CSMI has refused to say how much of the money it gets from the state is collected as profit.

Charter-school management organizations sometimes use other methods to generate profit. In a widely reported case, also in Florida, news outlets revealed that when Charter Schools USA opened a new school it would use its development arm to acquire land, construct a school, and then charge itself rent. One school was found to be paying 23 percent of its budget, about $2 million, in rent. A 2006 audit found that a cluster of charter schools in Miami-Dade County, run by operator Academica, had cost taxpayers $1.3 million using a similar leasing method.

Do students at charter schools perform better than traditional schools?

Answering that question isn’t as easy as it sounds. Some charter schools significantly outperform traditional public schools, while some traditional public schools significantly outperform charter schools.

Directly comparing test scores can also be tricky because charter schools and traditional public schools can have different demographic characteristics, such as more students that come from impoverished homes. In addition, although charter schools can’t selectively admit students, researchers say that some schools employ subtle strategies to weed out undesirable students. For instance, in a particularly high-profile case, it was revealed in 2012 that a charter school in northwest Philadelphia only made its enrollment applications available for one day a year at a local country club. In Cleveland, charter schools have been accused of expelling poor-performing students weeks before state tests in order to improve its average.

Stanford University has conducted some of the most comprehensive studies on the academic performance of charter schools in recent years. In a 2013 study, it found no statistically significant difference between the academic performance of students in charter schools and traditional public schools.

The Stanford study, however, found wide variation in performance of charter schools by state. The researchers found students in Pennsylvania charter schools were covering 50 days less learning in math and 29 days less learning in reading than their traditional public school peers. Those findings, the researchers said, were likely dragged down by cyber charter schools, which have a particularly poor achievement records.

Critics fear that bad charter schools can be particularly harmful to the educational outcomes of students. A study of charter schools in Milwaukee by a University of Oregon political economist found that one chain of low-budget schools offered a bare-bones curriculum that focused on little more than math test preparation and reading.

How do charter schools affect education funding in Pennsylvania?

One of the other big criticisms that opponents level at charter schools in Pennsylvania is that, owing to the peculiarities of how the state funds education, the proliferation of charter schools is severely harming the budgets of traditional public schools.

School districts in Pennsylvania must transfer 70 to 80 percent of their normal per-student cost over to a charter school for every student in the district that attends that school. That means every time a charter school gains a student, a school district loses funding. Previously, school districts were partially reimbursed by the state to offset the loss of students to charter schools, but this program was eliminated under Gov. Tom Corbett in 2011.

While it would seem to make sense that funding should follow a student, the problem is that most public schools have fixed costs, from heating costs to teaching staff, that can’t be easily downscaled when a few students leave in a given year. The result has squeezed funding at traditional public schools and for some school districts with large proportions of charter-school students, such as York City School District and Chester-Upland School District, it has played particular havoc with their finances.

Are there any other concerns with charter schools?

Critics have a number of other concerns with charter schools in Pennsylvania, which they largely attribute the profit-driven nature of many schools:

SPECIAL EDUCATION: A 2013 report by a legislative commission found that charter schools appeared to be taking advantage of the state’s funding formula for special-needs students. Schools receive more for a special-needs student than an average pupil to help them cover the cost of helping them learn. The commission found that charter schools appeared to be filtering out special-needs students with high-level needs in favor of those with minor issues who cost less to help. A 2014 analysis by TheNotebook, a media outlet that covers the state’s education sector, found that Pennsylvania charter schools received $350 million for special education students but spend just $156 million on them.

FRAUD: A number of high-profile fraud cases have surrounded Pennsylvania’s charter schools in recent years. At least eight charter school officials in Philadelphia have pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges. In 2012 and 2013, Dorothy June Brown, the founder of Agora Cyber School was charged by the federal government for embezzlement. In another high-profile case, Nicholas Trombetta, the founder of what became the state’s largest cyber school, was indicted in 2013 for stealing nearly a million dollars from taxpayers. A report released in September 2014 by the Center for Popular Democracy and other non-profit groups alleged that altogether charter schools in Pennsylvania have defrauded taxpayers at least $30 million over 17 years.

TRANSPARENCY: Critics charge that charter schools, unlike traditional public schools, are shielded from the same disclosure rules about their finances like traditional public schools. In a particularly high-profile case, the Philadelphia Inquirer spent years trying to get one large charter school operator, CSMI, run by Vahan Gureghian in the Chester-Uplands School District, to reveal how much taxpayer money it is collecting as its management fee.

OVERSIGHT: A 2014 report from Pennsylvania’s auditor general, Eugene DePasquale, a Democrat, criticized the lack of state oversight for charter schools. DePasquale recommended creating an independent board to oversee charter schools, requiring charter schools to present their annual reports to the host school board in a public meeting and creating more options for boards to monitor and renew charters. After performing audits on a number of charters and holding public hearings on the subject across the state, DePasquale told PennLive that the current system is “a mess, and you have sympathy for the charter schools and the traditional public schools.”